Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

Website tables

Hi guys , my website www.starpluservices.com on google first page for the past 2 years and we were page rank 4, 2 months ago we changed all page titles and Keewords after that the page rank droped to 1 and we are not anymore in page 1 in google, we have done all this changes to target another keyword Office Cleaning London, now after 2 months I had 3 quotes for SEO , and 2 SEO companies told me that I need a new website because my one was done with tables and the other company told me that if I still on first page with some keywords andon the 2 page with cleaning companies to dont make a new website just update my one!!

30 Responses

Page titles are a very important ranking factor and changing them will affect your ranking. You say that the new keyword you are trying to rank for is Office Cleaning London, do you have inbound links containing that anchor? I don't know what was the keyword you were ranking for the past 2 years but I assume you had a fair share of backlinks with anchor containing that keyword. There is more to consider, is the new keyword bringing you more or less traffic, is it converting better?

Let's keep this thread related to the original question posted. We make it real easy to create a new question and mark it as a discussion, and that's the more appropriate place for a level-headed discussion about some of these details that don't concern the OP as much as it does the people answering the questions.

Far too much talk about link juice. Google themselves say we want content. They have no problems crawling millions of Wordpress sites and if it were a really big problem, why would I rank first for phrases that run into a contention ratio of hundreds of millions? Why would loads of other Wordpress users?

I think what you have here is just a hatred of Wordpress because you see this as a major problem, when it clearly isn't.

OK so Bing found 700+ redirects. And? Is it making any difference to my ranking? Nope. In fact, I rank much higher in Wordpress for these phrases than I did with my HTML based site. If I was doing badly then yes, it could be an issue - but I'm not. Says to me that Google don't care as much as other factors.

Perhaps a few years ago when SEO was different to now, this might have been a big problems, but as any decent SEO knows, the rules have changes.

If you can tell me how I can rank better than 1st, then I am all ears ;)

Crawlability is a big thing, but clearly Google has no problems in crawling my site at all - or millions of other Wordpress sites.

Don't get me wrong, if I see things that are a big problem, then I fix them and had I missed this one on my site? yup! And thank you for pointing that out to me.

However, please don't dismiss an entire platform because of small issues. Mine was a mistake on my own site - most of my time is spent on other peoples so I tend to rush mine and fit it in when required.

And I have absolutely no problems with Google finding any of the pages at all - never had.

A very small issue. As long as Google can find the pages in a structured manner, that is all that matters.

Oh, and I think you fill find that the Bing toolkit is also looking at replies to blog posts. I have nothing like that number of pages on my site. I prefer not to use automated tools to try and build a good site with easy to find content.

I think the tool is not able to fully understand what is going on with the site - as I said, I have nothing like that number of pages on the site - the tool is trying its best to interpret what it doesn't understand.

Whilst it seems that you are just wanting to prove a point and win an argument, I am afraid you wont get that satisfaction from me.

Redirects are there for a reason in many cases and Wordpress sites generally do very well in Google - how else woud I get the rankings I do?

Some things that Wordpress does it does - accepted. If it was a problem, I would have spotted and changed it a long time ago. It isn't so I haven't.

End of as far as I am concerned.

----

Actually, I just want to say that if you run around trying to correct every little issue (and this is a little issue), then you spend no time in doing what actually matters, and that is creating content that Google wants to see.

you say that redirects are there for a reason, yes they are, they are in case there is a external link to the old url when you rewrite to a friendly url, you dont want exteral links to both, you would then a have a duplicate content problem. So the answere is to use a 301 redirect to the new from the old url. that is all correct.

But then you should not link to the old url with internal links and then redirecet to then ew url, because you leak link juice.

This s a common problem with Wordpress.

It is a problem, if you do not want to fix them, then dont. but itys still a link juice leak.

In Sergio's case, he only has a few pages (less than 20?). All he needs a an HTML site built in Dreamweaver and that the end of this discussion.

If not dreamweaver, then I would say WP.

Alan, don't get me wrong here.... I'm not saying that leaking link juice is not important. But I don't think Sergio needs to be concerned about it nor iNetSeo. If the loss of link juice is BIG, then hell yes; fix it. If it's small, then I wouldn't sweat the details. I have all kinds of errors on my sites, but trying to fix small errors isn't keeping me from ranking #1 - #3 for many of my top keywords. Feel free to run a Bing Report on my site if you want. I rank way stronger in yahoo and bing than in Google.

No its not the end of the discussion, dont take yourself too seriously

Its keeping a site from ranking higher, no matter what the rank at the moment. i dont think un-necessary redirects is a small problem, we try very hard to get a good link, but why would you try so hard to get a quality link and then let it leak as it flows though your site.

Remeber, it leaks not once, but many times as it flows though the site. i believe SEOMoz put the leak at about 10%, i have reason to believe it is 15%, but what ever it is, it is multiplied many times as the link juice flows though your site.

When you have 772 of them , thats a problem.

My point is fact, if you want to prented otherwise thats not my buiness, i really dont care if the leaks are fixed, but fact it is.

but the point is, WordPress is not good for crawlability, wordpress users dont like to here it but a crawl of any woprdpress site shows it to be true.

Many thanks guys , I have an offer from a London Based Company they will do a new website for £399 and they have done a lot of them . So should I just update my one and create a blog or do a new one? We still on google page one for commercial cleaning companies london, commercial cleaning services london, I'm just a bit afraid of loosing all this idf I do new page.www,starplusservices.com

For that price i suggest you will get a out of the box website, I would prpoably stick to the one you have.

On this about you analysis

taging as no-follow, unless you are linking to a spam site, it is of no use.

no following links, mean the linked page will get no link juice, but it want save you any, all links use link juice whether they are no-follow or not. The difference is with no follow it evaperates. so unless the linked site is of bad reputation and you do not want to look like your promoting spam then dont use a no-follow.

If tyou are a local business try and get some links from local directories, they are about the only cheap link that still has value.

This split your ranking as SE see this as 2 seperate pages, but also because the internal links link back to the index,htm, the link juice does not make it back to yourr home page. Its the same problem you have.

If you go ahead, you want to make sure all internal links to your home page point to domain.com, and not domain.com/index.htm

but they do look ok.

I would fix the site you have, i would fix the canonical domain with a 301 redirect and change internasl links to point ot it. that alone will help heaps.

the cheapest quote that I have to do this amendements is £350 so is nearlly the same as the new website, and they give a nother option wich is do my site in wordpress for £400 or a cms system for £250.

Dan is correct about your canonical domain problems but I have to disagree with using Wordpress, CMS makes thing easier to update , but do nothing for crawability. Having said that you can get a bespoke web site but stil have the same crawlability problems, as there are not many developers out there that understand the importance of crawability.

Thus my last sentence: A switch to wordpress (and I recommend Yoast's SEO for wordpress plugin) would fix all of this - but it has to be done right, by someone who knows what they're doing technically.

I agree that any platform is only as good as the person who builds it/works with it. Just think that assuming the dev is good, WordPress is generally the way to go for a site his size.

I agree with that, its depends on the dev, but i have never seen perfect crawlability on a wordpress site. Those that have come close have had programming knowalage and have stepped outside the CMS to fix things.

Let me answer the tables question first - a CSS layout does provide cleaner code, thus can help SEO a bit. But the main concern is not so much about tables, its that I imagine you're NOT on a CMS (content management system) like WordPress. A CMS would make it easier to update your content, add additional pages or content like a blog etc. That's why I would vote for a new site, built in WordPress.

Ok, onto the page rank issue. First, do know that page rank is nice to know, but don't obsess about it. Focus more on rankings->traffic->conversions.

Anyhow, I think its a 1 now because you're website can load any of the following ways;

starplusservices.com

starplusservices.com/index.html

www.starplusseervices.com

www.starplusservices.com/index.html

This was probably not the case before, but now all of your incoming links are being diluted across multiple ways of accessing your homepage. Whatever version of your website used to load by default, all versions of the homepage should redirect back to that.

You also don't need the keywords meta tag anymore.

A switch to wordpress (and I recommend Yoast's SEO for wordpress plugin) would fix all of this - but it has to be done right, by someone who knows what they're doing technically.

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.